Thinking about the Shift Index

The concept of the "Shift Index" has been making the rounds of management strategists and consultants, and I have been thinking about how it applies to biomedical informatics. For those who keep track of such things, American companies have lost as much as 75% on their "Return on Assets"," or ROA, since 1964. That is a pretty stunning number, and a recent article in the Harvard Business Review discusses some possible reasons why that is. Hagel et al., the authors of the piece, identify a shift of power to both consumers and to creative talent as one of the prime motivators of the change. In many ways, such large shifts in ROA can also be attributed to a much more competitive landscape, in which over the last forty years, companies outside of the United States have become more competitive, and are increasingly putting business and pricing pressure on domestic companies. This, also, as the Hagel and his colleagues point out, is the result of increasingly rapid shifts in what they call the "Foundation Index," a measure of underlying technology changes. These Foundational Changes are currently driving much of the overall Shift now, but the authors believe that this will eventually be eclipsed by other metrics which measure information flow and its impact.
The article and an associated paper with more details both talk about the need to increasingly structure organizations to enable staff beyond the "Creatives" (as per Richard Florida in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class) to dynamically contribute to the business. In bioinformatics, this is analogous to developing processes and systems that extend access to biomedical data beyond just the software engineers and other IT professionals, to the laboratory and clinical researchers at the front lines of science. Enabling those people to make effective use of the volumes of data generated by both internal and external sources will be a key differentiator between companies that leverage the shifts in knowledge flows that Hagel et al. are talking about and those that do not. Fostering the dynamic flow of useful information both to and from the front-line scientists and clinicians gives those most knowledgeable about the underlying processes the capability to derive useful information from what is out there, enabling conversion of that information into products efficiently and effectively. This is what will ultimately drive increasing Return on our scientific and bioinformatics Assets.